"A New Pearl Harbor"

A think tank wrote that transformation needed a catalyzing event. A year later it had one. The sentence never rested since.

'A New Pearl Harbor': the Project for the New American Century's 2000 report 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' noted that its proposed transformation would come slowly 'absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.' Documented: the sentence, the signatories who took office under Bush (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz), and the wars that followed. Lore reads a blueprint; the countercase reads a think-tank truism about bureaucratic inertia. The phrase is the map's canonical example of a real document doing infinite work.